Actually, my Google ratings have always been very pleasing to me. What I think my site is about and what they think my site is about always seems to agree.

Recently, I realized that I'd become far too much of a generalist and polyglot, largely because I didn't know "what I want to be when I grow up." I dumped some deadwood, wrote some new content, and waited for Google to catch up. It did.

My traffic has almost been in a holding pattern for weeks, not breaking above 80% of what it was last year. It's been hard to tell if Google has been holding back, but possible.

On Sunday it broke out, and is still very close to last year's numbers.

What's also odd about this is the reporting from Google Analytics. For years GA reported more page views than did my stats program. Late last year it started reporting fewer page views than my stats program. When my traffic broke out of the holding pattern on Sunday, GA started showing more page views than my stats.

looks like our drop could be a permanat one as all the DCs now show the same results! Frustrating as hell as our competitor sites are never really updatedand have so many broken links! I'm always on top of ours!

We're in panic mode over here, just lost 75% of our organic traffic. We're not sure why. It happened to us on the 28th as well. We're unsure how to proceed as we've always put a lot of efforts into SEO and upgrading the technology of our website (retail shopping site). no one over here is an SEO genius either. everything we've done so far, we've done through the consensus online about what are 'good seo practices'.

A lot of our links come from places like forums and blogs, most do, I would say about 80% do. In WMT we show very few errors ever, maybe 3 or 4 timed out/unreachable over the past few months, most of which cleared up on their own. The one thing i did notice was that our crawl rate increased by double in Dec and dropped in Jan. Also, the speed at which the bots were able to download a page increased by about double as well... But We're not skilled in this, and not exactly sure what to make of this.

Unfortunately, we depend on Google for $80 of our sales and without warning it has almost melted away completely.

It is my understanding that many other sites are experiencing this. What are you doing to react? What do you expect is the cause of this? What can we do to ease the panic and get back in Google's good graces? after all, we are a good company, white hat seo, fresh content, user friendly, all the good things that google wants. What could we have done wrong?

Thanks for any help. I am still quite new at this and could use any guidance. Feel free to pm me as well. Thanks!

I use [webrankinfo.com...] to check... Each DC over the space of 3 days all displayed the same. It wasn't like they all changed at once! One day one would display dropped rankings and then two more DCs the following day and then all of them! It was a trend - they all followed suit.

Some weird stuff w.r.t links again - In GWT, for a page I see 29 links from 30 source domains!

For the same site, I also see lower number of links now reported for internal pages, for some days now.Could this be hurting people this Jan?

I was trying to dig into this site (though the overall traffic to it remained the same) as the top pages weren't getting the same vol. of traffic as earlier and some pages lost some ranking.But this seem to have been compensated to some extent with traffic from other pages.

Hi, this is my first post here so please bar with me :) It's interesting reading here because we recently got a ranking slap from google for our site. We went from the first position to the secind page, adn the crawled back to the first page two days after. But not in the top positions.

Oddly enough there are now sites that have never been visible in the first 3 pages up in the top 10 results. These changes occured around mid January. Anyone else seen the same thing? thx

I think ever since caffeine we have all seen some movement every month and will probably continue to see monthly fluctuations from here on out. Google is capable of crunching and crawling a lot more data now so they can be more real time. Pre-caffeine the index was pretty static once they deemed it ready. Now it is Antibes guess where your site will rank from month to month.

i see serp shuffles - would better call them mess ups - since mid january on g.com and g.co.uk.

i dont really see its being about the uniqueness of the content however - all sites in my niche are small 5-10 pages (offering service), with their quality, amount, freshness, relevancy and uniqueness of content being about the same.

what i see instead is that the sites which built significant amounts of links recently having the biggest shuffle amplitude, jumping back and forth page 1 to page 8.

the top sites that done no link building recently are more less intact.

i cant really see how such dramatic shifts could be caused by content quality, which, i repeat, doesnt differ that huge much.

the only explanation coming to my mind might be that g devalued some sites from which the backlinks to dancing sites are coming. but then it would be plain drop, not dance...

According to comments this thread [webmasterworld.com], both backdraft7 and MelissaLB - yesterday (Jan 30) saw a ranking shift of some kind. It was bad for backdraft7 and a small improvement for MelissaLB - but in her words

Since Friday, our serps are all over the place. we've been monitoring about 10-15 keywords daily and there seems to be no rhyme or reason, some have gaining, some are losing.